by Lisa Blower
But then she turns on Selwyn again, and there’s more Welsh, and it’s aggressive. He answers her with a lot of hand gestures. Then she lowers her voice and speaks to him like he’s a cat curled up on her lap. I watch this all from behind the third wine bottle, until I press my fingers in my ears and shout for them to, ‘STOP!’
They both look at me.
They carry on looking at me.
But what to say? Stop leaving me out? Stop talking in your language? Stop all this past without me in it?
Selwyn gets up and asks for the bathroom. I reach across for the wine bottle and pour what’s left of it in my glass. Ilma lets me, like she expects it of me. Then she sets about rolling us cigarettes again, even though I haven’t finished mine, and I watch how she does it like it’s an art. How she pulls out two papers and shapes two thin snakes of tobacco; how she tells me that she married a snake, and that the worst thing about marrying a snake is that you never know whether their coiling around you is to work out the size of you in order to digest you. She seals the papers around the tobacco and pushes one towards me.
‘For later,’ she says. Then she blows smoke across the table and says she’s going to just say this. That when we get to Sioned, the water will be clear. And that she likes me. ‘You’re not what I expected at all,’ she says. ‘But I do. I like you very much.’
I bite my lip and play with the burning cigarette between my fingers.
‘Did he know you were here?’ I murmur. The smoking is giving me a sandpaper throat.
‘He knows where he’s going,’ she replies. ‘And he’s taking you with him. Remember that.’
‘But I don’t know where that is,’ I whisper, and I start to say something about Meg. How her broken-mirrored take on the world would have her tear up the maps so I knew nowhere else. ‘Every day is a foreign place,’ I say. ‘And he drifts further and further out of sight.’
At that, Selwyn slouches back into the room, hunkered in drink, and stops me from saying any more. Ilma slaps her hands back down on the table. She’s forgotten about the crumble. It’ll need half an hour in the oven. Selwyn tells her not to get up, to stop apologising, and there’s something in Welsh again, their voices kept low and below the candleflame. Ilma nods – she understands – and he leans over to kiss the top of her head. Then she holds her hand out to me and I take it, though this time the handshake is strong and full of sympathy.
‘So you’ve lost a daughter too,’ she says, slowly. ‘I’m so sorry.’
I snatch my hand away and look over at Selwyn who stares down at the table.
‘No, no. She’s not lost. She’s in New Zealand.’
Ilma turns to look at Selwyn who meets her gaze. Something else in Welsh, and something Welsh spills from him too.
‘Even so,’ Ilma says, looking at me again. ‘The wrench I’m sure you’ll understand.’
Something is happening. Something is not being said.
‘No. I don’t understand,’ I say, my temper heating up. ‘You keep talking in Welsh and I don’t understand Welsh. I didn’t even know that Selwyn understood or spoke Welsh, but he does and so do you. Which means both of you understand each other, but not me, you have your own language, you have this…this… I don’t even know what this is between you!’
‘Time to go.’ And Selwyn has somehow manoeuvred himself to be behind me with his hands on my shoulders, my coat under his arm. I shrug him off and reach over for the bottle of wine again. I am laughing. It’s all so funny. I pour what’s left into my glass and drain it so petulantly the bitterness overwhelms and starts a coughing fit. Ilma looks over at me and then up at Selwyn above me. She says his name as if it’s made with ice-cream and sensitive on her teeth, then she looks across at me, and says, ‘I understand you, Ginny. Think what you like, but I understand you more than you think.’
She fetches me a glass of water and orders me to drink it straight down to calm the inflammation in my throat. And then silence between us. Him and her and me. Wherever we go, we are three; never this couple he keeps banging on about.
‘It is never just us,’ I tell the table. ‘Is it, Selwyn? Even when there is no one, there is someone always there.’
But I am drunk and he is lifting me up. He steers me into the hallway – one foot in front of the other – and out into the night.
The Ninth Day
‘Bacteria and fungi are nature’s great agency for bringing about decay and decomposition. Without them, the world would be piled up with dead bodies and stinking.’
~ The Great Necessity of Ponds
by Selwyn Robby
WE ACTUALLY SLEPT IN the caravan last night. We pulled the mattresses out in silence, zipped them together, and shook out the duvet. I’d expected mustiness and married women, but they smelt brand new.
Selwyn fetched the pillows from the top shelf of the cupboard and we took it in turns to clean our teeth at the bathroom sink, like strangers in a public toilet. We undressed and put on jumpers. Neither of us said goodnight. I don’t know who fell asleep first.
Selwyn isn’t there when I wake up. Coffee, I assume. Duncan. No doubt all speaking a language I will never understand. I wonder why he is so keen to meet him, the son that isn’t his, but my head hurts. I am parched. It’s been a long time since I’ve drunk that much wine so quickly, but I suppose that’s what old friends do.
I look out of the caravan window. It’s raining this morning, and the raindrops wriggling across the glass remind me of tadpoles – lives just starting out. I search for aspirin and hear a phone ring. I scurry about to find it before remembering we don’t have one, presume it is someone’s in the motorhome next door. I look at the optics on the caravan wall and think about hair of the dog. The caravan door opens and Selwyn strides in, buoyant as you like, carrying a great big roll of pond lining. I can smell liver and onions on his breath and he is still wearing last night’s shirt.
He stands very tall in front of me, proud as a woodcock, like he is about to announce something. There are beads of sweat on his forehead and I wonder if this is when he will tell me that he does have that terminal disease after all; that Duncan is his – the resemblance is uncanny – and he and Ilma have rekindled their flame.
‘You’re finally up then?’ he says, rolling the pond lining underneath the bar.
‘Is there something you want to tell me?’ I strain to keep my voice in a straight line.
‘You knew I was going for breakfast.’ He runs both hands through his hair. ‘What?’
‘It’s just that there seems to have been an awful lot of women in your life.’ I say it as if accusing him of putting a black sock in with a white wash. He squints at me, as if the light in the caravan is too much pressure for his eyes, and he even shields his face.
‘They keep turning up,’ I carry on. ‘Without explanation.’
‘And there is only one woman I’ve wanted to share my life with, Ginny, and if you don’t know by now that it is you, then I don’t know what we’re doing here.’
‘You brought us here!’ I shout back. ‘And here was Ilma! We go to Hodnet, and there is Rachael!’
‘And here could’ve been a man, not so different to myself, that you could be swearing to me meant nothing at all.’
I lay my head on the cold leather of one of the barstools and ask him, as nicely as I can manage, to stop shouting at me. My head is pounding.
‘Why aren’t you suffering?’ I groan childishly. ‘Why is it only me?’
‘Suffering?’ he repeats. ‘Why aren’t I suffering?’ And suddenly, he’s pulling me up from the bar stool and holding on to my shoulders with fingers like pincers. ‘Suffering?’ he says to me again, as if he’s just understood the word. ‘You have no idea, Ginny. No fucking idea what suffering really is.’
And I gasp, because Selwyn never swears. And if my mind didn’t feel like it’d cut all ties as a blood relation, I may have had something coherent to say. But whatever it was, it is over before it’s started, and he is sorry abo
ut it. He tells me that he’s going outside to hook us back up to the caravan, so I might feel a jolt or two, and then we can be on our way.
Another dual carriageway. A straight road ahead. A lot of silence. Until Selwyn suddenly says, ‘I needed to get the caravan valued. That’s why we went there.’
I carry on looking out of the window. I feel his eyes weighing heavy on my shoulders.
‘Duncan Cheadle is someone Louis told me about. Said he might give me a clear idea of what I could do with it. The metal is decent, you see.’ He pauses. ‘I didn’t put two and two together until I saw Ilma.’ He pauses again. Comes down in the gears as we approach a roundabout. Makes another decision without me and goes straight across it. ‘It was lovely to see her. I mean, never in a million years did I expect to run into her.’ He makes it sound like an epitaph. ‘Look, you can’t be like this. You have to appreciate that I had a life before you, and, yes, there are things I’d like to do, to see again, but it’s not some great plan I have that I’ve not been telling you about.’
I point out of the windscreen. ‘Is this you going back home then? Is that what this is all about? Did you think I wouldn’t want to come, because I know nowhere else?’
But he’s leaning against the door of the car and the steering wheel seems to be moving by itself. He’s altered the new convex mirror to improve his view in the wing mirror and perhaps it’s too heavy for the wing mirror to carry. Perhaps he hasn’t followed the instructions correctly or fitted the right screw. I start to wonder if convex-mirror fitting is like shoe fitting and that width is as important as length. I wonder if we were sabotaged at the trade fair by some envious caravanners looking in. He also seems to have dropped further down in his seat and is leaning to the right. He doesn’t seem to have the strength to keep us in a straight line.
‘Christ, Selwyn! What’s happening?’
He is shaking his head in time with the sway of the car. His face is a knot of clenched eyebrows, sucked-in cheeks and gritted teeth. I panic he’s having a stroke, but he says it’s not him, it’s the caravan. He’s holding on to the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles have gone white. He pushes his foot down hard on the brake and I’m thrown slightly.
‘Put on the hazards! Put on the hazards!’ he shouts.
I press the button with its little red triangle and listen to the faint tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock as Selwyn slows right down and makes to drive the caravan to the side of the road, where he lifts up the handbrake with two hands and turns off the car. He looks at me. He is pale. He had, for a moment, lost control. We both breathe heavily.
‘Must be the coupling head,’ he says gravely. ‘Something’s amiss.’
He checks in his mirrors, looking, I assume, for a gap in the traffic when he can get out of the car. I get out too. He asks me what I’m doing.
‘I’m not staying in the car if you’re not in the car,’ I say.
For once he doesn’t argue with me. Instead, he comes around to my side of the car and gets down on his hands and knees to look underneath. I wonder if I should do the same. I realise I have never looked under a car before, so get down on all fours to do so.
‘I don’t need you down here too,’ he says crossly. ‘You’re casting a shadow.’
‘I’ve never seen under a car before,’ I tell him.
‘You don’t know what you’re looking at,’ he snaps back. ‘Get up.’
‘Do you know what you’re looking at?’ I haven’t got up but am settled back on my haunches with my hands flat on my thighs. ‘And the coupling is there, by the caravan, not under here.’
He turns to give me a dirty look.
‘I’m not the unhitched head,’ I tell him. ‘So you can stop looking at me like I am.’
He tells me to get back into the car. I tell him I will not. If a lorry comes around that bend, and the driver loses his grip on the steering wheel and ploughs into us, I will die and he will not because he is out of the car. Selwyn stands up and shakes his head at me.
‘Don’t be clever,’ he says, heading towards the axle.
‘Then don’t be smart,’ I call after him. ‘Where are we anyway?’
He pretends he hasn’t heard me over the traffic. He doesn’t know either.
He does, however, eventually agree with me that the coupling has not unhitched and the convex mirror is not too heavy either. We are not out of petrol. He dipped the dipstick and this seemed fine too, though I didn’t feel at all comfortable with that being the way that you checked the oil. ‘Is that really all you have to do?’ And if I told him once, I told him six or seven times to check inside the caravan, which he eventually did. And it would be my box that caused the problem, wouldn’t it?
It had dislodged, fallen from the cupboard above the bar, where Selwyn had stashed it when we left home, and had obviously been sliding around the floor until it had worked itself under a barstool. As Selwyn reminded me, ‘I told you it would only take a tin opener.’
‘What the hell is in there, anyway?’ he asks.
I help myself to a squirt of vodka from the optics.
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘is it absolutely necessary?’
‘It’s the only thing I have in this caravan that I want with me,’ I say sternly. He glares at me. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Selwyn, I’m talking possessions, not you.’ I remind him there’s all that pond liner Ilma gave to him. ‘What do you intend to do with that?’
‘Even so,’ he says, placing the box in front of me. ‘It could’ve killed us.’
I start to laugh. ‘For goodness sake, Selwyn. Compared to what you have stashed away in this caravan, that box is small fry. It’ll take a lot more than that to drive us off the road.’
‘It upset the balance,’ he is raising his voice at me. ‘That time we were lucky.’
I start to gape. ‘Are you being serious?’
‘Of course I’m being serious,’ he carries on shouting. ‘We almost unhitched!’
By now, I’m incredulous. ‘You’re being completely ridiculous!’ I tell him. ‘Whatever’s a matter with you? Have you actually lost your mind?’
He is staring down at the box with his lips pursed, and clawing at his jaw.
‘Oh, no,’ I say. ‘It comes with me.’
‘Then we’ll need to negotiate its contents to regain the balance,’ he says stiffly.
‘What are you talking about? Selwyn, for goodness sake! It’s just a box of silly stuff—’
He interrupts me, ‘A box that’s unbalancing the weight. It drove us off the road!’
‘You are not getting rid of that box.’ I make it sound like the statement it is meant and even slap my hand down on a barstool. ‘There’s a lot more in this caravan that’s weighing us down and what’s in that box is of no consequence. No consequence at all. Whatever is wrong with you? I don’t understand why you’re being so stupid! This is crazy!’
He keeps on shaking his head at me like he’s appalled, disgusted, and the air between us is clammy. ‘Then we can’t go on,’ he says. ‘That’s it. Journey over.’ He stands away from the box with his arms folded, like a sulking child too young for a gobstopper. He says, ‘Safety first, Ginny.’
I burst out laughing again, but he is absolutely deadly serious, which makes me more incensed. ‘You have pulled some stunts on me on this trip, Selwyn Robby, but this? This takes the biscuit when you have all that heavy bloody pond equipment and those fish, for fuck’s sake! Those fucking fish! This is absurd. And entirely unreasonable! What on earth has got into you?’
But he is steadfast. Sets himself in breezeblocks again and folds his arms tighter. I have never seen him like this before. He’s behaving like a blunt pencil. He gestures again at the box with his head. He will have no other view on this.
‘Well, then it’s over,’ he says. ‘That’s as far as we go.’
And he slams the caravan door on his way back out on to the road.
I STAND ON THE roadside with my box at my feet. This is a fast road. Even faster
than the dual carriageway on the flyover that I have lived below. The traffic keeps on coming, as I should have seen this coming. An articulated lorry drives so close that it almost clips the new convex mirror and whips it off. I imagine my face in the smashed glass down there on the tarmac. How my veins have started to look like roads to North Wales, South Wales, and all those mountains in the middle. How I can see what’s happening – my eyes feel as wide open as this road – and I can hear what he tells me, but I don’t seem to be able to connect it with my body to do anything about it. I’m aside of him but on the side, and that girl I was – all blurry to me – is running to catch up with us when I’m already right here.
A motorcyclist. A trade van for a drainage company. A mini bus. Three silver cars in a row, and I try not to be superstitious. I think of what I must look like to the passing traffic. A woman. On the side of the road. Abandoned. A car to the side with a now completely unhitched caravan. I wonder why no one stops.
In a blind moment of insanity, I stick out my thumb, urged on by the sudden desire to be in a car with someone else. But every car that passes me ignores me. Then a car starts to indicate and slows down. He is stopping. Then he isn’t stopping. He’s indicated not for me but for something else. His journey carries on. Perhaps I didn’t look troubled enough. Or too old.
Then a van starts to slow. A tidy-looking small black van driven by a man in a shirt and tie. Professional. Business-like. I can smell his aftershave from here. He is grinning like he knows – he knew – we wouldn’t make it. He’s surprised we’ve made it this far. His hair is different, less grey, more unruly, and he’s been following us all this time.
He indicates. My feet are rooted like horntails in a pond, though the rest of me floats above them. The van is suddenly aside of me. The passenger window is wound down. The man is bent towards the passenger seat and I can hear the rustle of papers, things he is moving to empty the seat for me. He calls out. ‘You okay there?’ His voice is rich with his own downfall. ‘Where are you going?’ he asks. ‘Can I help?’